Adam Zivo: When truth is harder to sell than fiction

A MAGA influencer causes a ruckus in Kyiv — but is forced to reconsider his narratives in the face of suffering on the ground.

By: Adam Zivo

Can explicitly partisan “citizen journalists” be trusted to cover conflict zones accurately? That question buzzed in some social media circles last month after Nick Shirley, a 22-year-old MAGA influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers, visited Ukraine to make a short documentary.

Shirley belongs to a new class of pro-Trump content creators who have built large, youthful followings by commenting on hot-button social issues. While his early work consisted of apolitical prank videos, he pivoted last year and now mostly publishes interviews with illegal migrants, college students, and LGBTQ people. He also occasionally travels for on-the-ground reports, and has visited the southern U.S. border and an El Salvadoran super-prison.

Two weeks ago, Shirley announced on Instagram that he had gone to Kyiv to “figure out where your taxes are going.” He followed up with a video montage wherein he made silly faces in front of luxury cars, a glowing ferris wheel, and people drinking in bars. “175 BILLION dollars goes a long way … This is in the capital of Ukraine,” he wrote on X.

The clip quickly went viral, amassing over three million views and 14,000 comments on Shirley’s social media accounts alone. It was gleefully amplified by pro-Russian voices, who claimed that American aid is being widely embezzled, and fit into a wider propaganda campaign to minimize the war by vilifying benign aspects of Ukrainian life — i.e. people eating McDonalds in Kyiv or sunbathing in Odesa.

Ukrainians and conflict journalists quickly pointed out that the influencer had grossly misrepresented wartime realities. Ukraine is a large country, and the horrors of Russia’s invasion are overwhelmingly concentrated near the frontlines in the east and south. Many cities outside of these areas, including Kyiv, are regularly targeted by missiles and drones, but Western-provided air defences intercept most attacks. This permits a certain degree of normalcy and economic continuity, which protects the country from collapse.

Perhaps this sounds a little abstract, so allow me to illustrate with an example from my own life.

In Odesa, where I am currently staying, we had a ballistic missile hit the harbour a few weeks ago. It took approximately 45 seconds to zip over from Crimea, so there was no warning of its arrival. The air siren went off, and then, seconds later, an explosion thundered across the city. I went to the hallway, away from the windows, and called my boyfriend to make sure he was okay. Hours after the missile strike, we grabbed Chinese food in a bustling tourist district where buskers sold flowers to thumping techno. In a bar, a group of youth, too young for conscription, danced under neon lights and an overworked fog machine.

A week later, two acquaintances of mine, Zarina Zabrinsky and Caolan Robertson of Byline Times, made several social media posts documenting how Russian drones have been hunting civilians in Kherson — 11 civilians were injured in the city that day.

These are the contrasts of war. People drink coffee on patios and swim in the sea, to the occasional percussion of explosions, while knowing that, only hours away, the soil is being fertilized with blood. Life persists because it must.

This brittle normalcy, along with the regional disparities of wartime suffering, are a basic fact of contemporary Ukrainian life. Though foreigners are generally unaware of this, residents grasp it quickly. Similarly, those who come to Ukraine immediately notice that, despite outdated negative stereotypes about eastern Europe, the country is well-developed and quite beautiful.

So, naturally, critics wondered why Shirley had sequestered himself in Kyiv, away from major hotspots, and failed to show the destroyed parts of the capital. Some commentators pointed out that it is possible to find rich people, and their cars, in any global city and that the glowing ferris wheel, having been installed in 2017, had nothing to do with American taxpayers.

“Come to Kherson, where Russians drones will hunt you down the street in between artillery attacks. Come to Sumy or Kharkiv where aerial guided bombs will pulverize you,” replied Zabrinsky, a journalist with Byline Times who spent months near the frontlines.

Different truths emerge

Within a few days, Robertson published an interview with two fixers — Corrie Nieto and Darina — who had arranged Shirley’s trip and driven him around Kyiv.

Nieto, an American journalist who lives in Ukraine, said that Shirley had, in reality, been “very nervous” while in the country. Although Nieto had encouraged Shirley to visit Kharkiv, a major city near the Russian border which is constantly being bombed, the influencer allegedly declined because he “didn’t want to put his life in danger.” Nieto called Shirley a “sociopath” and said that his “fake” online persona “just makes my blood boil.”

Darina concurred that Shirley was “kind of scared” during his visit and that he seemed “very surprised” by the “burned and destroyed” homes she had shown him in Bucha. The town, located 20 km northwest of Kyiv, had been occupied by Russia for a month and a half at the outset of the war. Hundreds of civilians had been executed during that brief window. She said that he seemed confused about whether the damage was caused by Russia or Ukraine.

A few days later, Robertson secured an interview with Shirley himself.

In an uncomfortable 15-minute video, the influencer backtracked from his previous post, which he claimed was satirical, and said that it “does not define everything I did while I was in Ukraine.” When pressed on why he had avoided visiting east Ukraine, he claimed that he had actually been there. “Isn’t Buch East Ukraine? I went somewhere where there was … Bucha. It was Bucha,” he said. “Is that not East of Ukraine?”

Bucha is nowhere near east Ukraine. To make a comparison, the mix-up is akin to a journalist visiting Toronto, reporting that no part of Canada is experiencing economic decline, and then, upon being asked whether they visited the Maritimes, replying: “Yes, of course. I took a day trip to Brampton.”

The following day, Shirley released his 24-minute documentary, “72 Hours inside Ukraine in 2024,” on YouTube. The film, which is structured almost like a travelogue, unexpectedly turned out to be quite good. The Ukrainian suffering that had hitherto been absent was given centre stage, while MAGA conspiracy theories were, for the most part, left on the cutting room floor.

In the film, Shirley tours Kyiv’s recently-bombed children’s hospital, laments its destruction and notes that “hard-working doctors and nurses” continue to work there. He interviews several traumatized Ukrainians, including a young woman who lived under Russian occupation and a grieving mother whose sons were killed in the war. He even summarizes Russia’s propaganda campaigns, and documents his own nervousness during a nighttime air siren, later revealing that a Russian missile had been shot down en route to the city.

This solid and empathetic piece of journalism is marred only by a brief, malapropos segment wherein Shirley, upon seeing several residential construction projects, speculates, without evidence, that American aid is being funnelled into real estate.

As of now, the documentary has around 70,000 views — which is far less than what his normal videos receive, and only a fraction of the millions reached by his first, propagandistic clip. If the film is to be considered redemptive, then it is simply insufficient in this respect.

Complicating things further, Shirley shared another interview, not found in the documentary, wherein a random Ukrainian man on the streets of Kyiv suggests that a large portion of international aid — more than one per cent — is being embezzled. The video reinforced Shirley’s recurring narrative, which is popular among MAGA circles, that a significant chunk of Ukrainian aid is being stolen.

Look, few deny that corruption is a problem in Ukraine, but available evidence suggests that, when it comes to foreign aid, the problem is much less severe than certain voices want the public to believe.

The country’s two largest wartime embezzlement scandals, in which public funds were stolen through inflated food, jacket and artillery procurement contracts, led to combined estimated loss of $67 million. This sum, while considerable, constitutes only 0.06 per cent of the $107 billion sent to the Ukrainian government. Not only that, the key officials involved, including former defence minister Oleksii Reznikov, were either arrested or forced to resign.

The sums at play, and the government’s real, if imperfect, anti-corruption efforts, are a far cry from the “Ukraine aid is a scam” narrative being pushed by Moscow and its MAGA allies.

Ukrainian journalists and civil society actors, who have invested gargantuan efforts into exposing corruption, could have provided a more accurate and nuanced account of this problem. If asked, some of them would have undoubtedly given Shirley interviews. But, instead, the influencer found some random man on the street, with no apparent qualifications, to support his narrative.

That’s not journalism.

Making sense of things

I’ve often wondered, during my long stays in wartime Ukraine, whether it would be worth it to invite anti-Ukrainian influencers to visit the country. First-hand experience is a powerful antidote to propaganda, so would a visit to Ukraine’s safer cities provide a sufficient dose of reality? If not, would it be helpful, or even possible, to bring these people closer to the frontlines? How much pain would they have to witness to understand this place?

Shirley provides a useful, if unexpectedly complicated, case study. How does someone make an empathetic documentary about Ukrainian suffering and then pretend, on social media, that it doesn’t exist?

I personally suspect that the influencer came to Ukraine to create embarrassing propaganda about the country, but pivoted after realizing that on-the-ground realities don’t match MAGA narratives. I also suspect that, despite this pivot, he remains committed to some of these narratives because that is simply expected of him.

Being an influencer is a job, after all, and partisan ragebait gets more clicks than conscientious reporting.

It’s also hard for anyone, let alone a political commentator, to admit that they were wrong about a subject. Destroyed buildings and crying mothers are hard to argue with, so it would have been near-impossible to ignore the legitimacy of Ukrainian pain; corruption is a comparatively abstract problem. Challenging misconceptions about it requires research, which Shirley seems to be bad at, based on his earlier videos. So it is more comfortable to stay misinformed.

That is what the situation seems like to me, but the influencer did not respond to a request for an interview, so the full breadth of his experiences and motives remain opaque. Whatever they may be, his actions seem to show, at the very least, that though hearts can be moved by visiting Ukraine, which is better than nothing, cognitive dissonance is still a powerful force.

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